Twenty-Four Little Excuses to Leave the House in December

Two Decembers ago we sat at the kitchen table with a ball of string, a stack of brown envelopes from the drawer under the stairs and a felt-tip pen that was nearly dead. We were trying to solve a problem we'd had for years: December is lovely in the abstract and utterly exhausting in practice.

The big stuff was never the issue. The switch-on, the school nativity, the drive to see the lights — all booked, all fine. It was the Tuesdays. The dead middle of the week, dark by half four, nothing on, everyone a bit frayed, and a chocolate calendar that's been demolished by the seventh.

So we wrote twenty-four small things on twenty-four scraps of paper, hung them up, and had a go. We've tinkered with it every year since. It's the cheapest tradition we've ever started and the one people ask about most.

The idea, in one sentence

Instead of a square of chocolate each morning, you open a small instruction — something to do, somewhere to walk, a ten-minute job with a nice view at the end of it.

That's it. No wreath-making masterclass, no matching pyjamas, no elaborate elf business. Most of ours cost nothing and take less than an hour, and a fair few of them are things we'd have done anyway if we'd remembered to.

The three rules we settled on

Rules make it sound stern. They're really just the things we learned the hard way, in the order we learned them.

One in three. Never two big things on consecutive days. December is full of other people's plans, and a calendar that needs a car journey every evening will collapse by the twelfth. Roughly a third of ours are five-minute jobs, a third are local wanderings, and a third involve a kettle.

Under a fiver, or free. Not because we're pious about it, but because the moment it costs money it stops being a small adventure and starts being a commitment. We allow ourselves one total splurge across the whole month — usually a garden centre trip with a coffee — and the rest is pocket change.

Nobody gets to be smug about it. If we miss a day, we miss it. The envelope goes back on the string with the next day's and we carry on. A calendar you dread is not a treat, it's admin.

How the thing is actually built

Nothing fancy. Brown envelopes, one for each day, numbered 1 to 24 with a marker pen. We punch a hole in a corner, thread them onto garden twine and pin the lot along a kitchen shelf, so it droops a bit in the middle and looks homemade — which it is.

Inside each envelope goes a slip of paper with a single line on it. Some years we've put in a small extra: a teabag, a chocolate coin, a charity shop bookmark. Children in the house will want to take turns opening, so number them and don't let anyone peek. Our one concession to fairness is that the two most exciting slips are on 1 and 24.

We keep the master list in the back of a notebook and cross things off as they're used, then swap the boring ones out the following year. The list is not a heirloom. It's a working document.

The sort of things that go in

Here's a fair flavour of ours, grouped the way we actually think about them.

Free and done in minutes: walk the long way round to the shop and come back via the road with the best decorated house. Post a card by hand instead of in the postbox. Say yes to the first invitation that arrives that day. Read a chapter aloud instead of scrolling.

Out of the door, still no money: a torchlit lap of the local park at half five. A walk to the churchyard to look at the old stones in the dark. Find the town's least impressive Christmas tree and admire it anyway. Fifteen minutes on a bench with a flask, coats done up properly.

A few pounds: a charity shop rummage with a strict £3 limit and one purchase each. Two coffees at the cafe by the bus station. A bag of chips eaten out of the paper on the seafront or the canal bank, whichever is nearer. A bag of birdseed and a park bench.

The good ones, saved for the tired days: drive twenty minutes to a village you've never stopped in and find its pub. Write the Christmas cards together at the table with something on the radio. Make the slow dinner — the one that takes an hour and a half and fills the kitchen with steam.

The get-out clause is the whole point

Every year, someone asks what happens if it rains. The answer is that the calendar bends. The walk in the park becomes a drive to look at lights from inside a warm car. The charity shop trip becomes a wet-hour rummage in the covered market. You are allowed to swap a slip for any other slip, any time, and there is no committee to answer to.

It also helps to build in three or four deliberately dull ones — 'make a cup of tea and look out of the window for ten minutes' is a legitimate entry — so that the whole enterprise has a bit of slack in it.

What it actually does to the month

We didn't expect much beyond a bit of fun, and the first year we were honestly just pleased we'd stuck it out to the twenty-fourth.

But the strange thing is how much of December it gives back. It gets you out of the house on the evenings you'd have stayed in and gone to bed early. It makes you walk down streets you've driven past for years. It turns 'we should go and see the lights at some point' into a date in the diary, which is the only way that sentence ever becomes anything.

Most of all, it slows things down. You notice the town getting ready for Christmas because you're out in it, on foot, in the cold, instead of watching it through a windscreen.

Starting tonight

You don't need to have planned the whole month. Write six envelopes this evening and hang them up. Add the rest later — by the twelfth nobody is checking whether the string is full.

One tip, from experience: put the first one where you'll see it before you've had your coffee, and make it something that takes four minutes. December either starts gently or it doesn't start at all.